Figure 1 Photo of original, by Shultz
Illustrated construction guide
Published in Flying Models, January 1969, and flown in the ’68 Nat’s, the Torino, named for Jim Vornholdts new car, just makes it into being “Classic Legal” by 1 year.
Dessigned by Jack Sheeks,one of our most prolific designers. He almost single handedly kept the CL stunt fires burning during the dark years when many proclaimed that Control line is dead, by publishing nearly one design a month in the various magazines of the day.
He is now honored at each VSC, Vintage stunt Championships, a large contest, more of a love fest, held each year during the month of March, in Tucson, with the perpetual Jack Sheeks Award.
This award is actually in two parts. The best appearing, and the highest placing Sheeks design.
I believe there are at least 25 designs that qualify as Classics so there should be one that trips your trigger.
The Torino is one that tripped my trigger big time. I decided several years ago that there would be one in my future. I redrew the plans into the CAD format, and when I started up this website, wanted to include it in my offerings.
I contacted Jack to get his permission to offer the plans and kit, which he readily gave, with the provision that I receive permission from Carstens, the publisher of “Flying models”.
Even though “Flying Models” still offers the original plans, they gave me permission
to offer my re-
The New Plans
Originally published as one sheet, my version of the plans contain 3 sheets. Sheet one details the fuselage. The second sheet details the wing and stab. The third sheet is the pattern sheet. All the parts are illustrated full sized and can be used to accurately cut the parts needed to construct the Torino.
Each set from me are a first generation plot from the CAD file, and should be very accurate, with no elongation as sometimes found with copied plans.
The Short Kit
Most of us are familiar with what a “kit” is, not as many know what a “Short Kit” is.
A short kit consists of the curved cut parts, the plywood parts, and sometimes other parts that need to be accurately cut for fits.
What is not included are the sheets, blocks, landing gear wires, control systems, wheels, tanks, and coverings. Other items may also not be included. I am negotiating with CLC to make drop in controls available
I have made arrangements with several laser cutters to cut the parts. They do an excellent job, but laser time, as well as time devoted to setting up the cut files can be expensive. I try to help out by setting up the cut files, and carefully determining which parts actually need to be laser cut.
For instance, I had the prototype kits for the torino include laser cut strip ribs. This was a nice touch, but the added laser time, cutting all those ribs, really added up fast, and caused the costs to be higher than I wanted it to be. The solution turned out to be simple. I’ve replaced the laser cut strip ribs with a laser cut strip rib cutting jig.
I tried this out, and using it is easy, and a hundred strip ribs can be accurately, and easily, cut in an hour or so.
So, let’s look at one of the prototype short kits.
This is before the parts are removed from the sheets.
Lazer cutters try to balance the power of the lazer, and the speed of the cut, to minimize excessive burning, and blackening of the parts.
Lazer cutting is accurate, and the parts usually come out cleanly, but depending on the wood density from one sheet, or even part of the same sheet, can result in parts requiring a little help from an exacto knife to part clean. It helps to lightly sand the back of the sheets.
In this view, the parts have been removed from their carrier sheets. I left the lazer cut strip ribs in their carrier sheets to avoid damage. Costs have made it to expensive to include these strip ribs, unless specially ordered.
Not all lazer cutting tables are long enough to cut all the parts full length. In this case, a little joining is needed to get the parts the right length. The accuracy of the lazer makes these joinings very tight and therefore strong.
It doesn’t take a lot of glue. Notice the saran wrap covering the desk surface.
Take a little time and splice these parts up before actually starting the build.
OK, all parts have been prepped, and we are ready to start, but first, let’s get an idea for the weight.
All the cut parts equal 13.31 oz’s. So far so good.
The Fuselage
Unlike other methods of construction, I-
Locate the two bulkheads, and your motor mount material. There are several items I feel you need to be aware of before starting the fuselage.
The bulkheads are sized to automatically build in about 1 degree of downthrust.
The final shape of the motor mounts is designed to accommodate your fuel tank. I prefer to use an RC style plastic tank, converted to a uniflow stunt tank.
When I use this style of tank, I relieve the underside of the mounts, so the tank can be better centered behind the engine.
Notice the extended tips, that will be behind the last bulkhead. This being the prototype, I wanted to extend the mounts to near the high point of the wing. In actual practice, this is not a workable solution, and you may notice in later pictures that I shortened them by at least half.
I started with the motor mounts upside down from this view, and carefully aligned and epoxied the first bulkhead into place. Use a square, a box, or whatever method you can think of to get the mounts square, and aligned.
Once the epoxy is set, turn the assembly over, Locate the correct distance, and epoxy the second bulkhead into place. Again use a square, or whatever jigging system you like, but make it square. Notice that the aft bulkhead does not protrude as far below ( on top actually) as the front bulkhead.
When the fuselage sides are glued into place, the down thrust is automatically set.
It’s now the time to fit in the cross grained balsa between the motor mounts, between the two bulkheads.
For added strength and stiffness, I added balsa to top of the mounts, and sanded it to a wedge shape.
Notice the fuselage sides in the background. They have the plywood doublers epoxied in place, and are now ready to be glued to the motor crutch assembly.
A good fuselage jig is helpful to get everything accurately aligned, but if you’re careful, a couple of squares will work with this short fuselage.
If your fuselage is squared up properly, when you pull the aft end together, it will match up properly. Notice the tail piece, and that I have shortened the motor mount extensions so I can finish the fuselage.
You can see the down thrust that’s built in, in this view. I also drilled the mounts, and have installed threaded inserts.
Shaping the fuselage
we start by mounting the engine, and adding the balsa fillers to the front end.
I’ve installed a spinner to aid shaping the front. The masking tap is used to protect the spinner from getting scratched when shaping. The turtle deck block has yet to be shaped, as well as the bottom of the fuselage. I’ll shape the turtle deck and then start making and shaping the cowl.
The cowl sides are made from laminations of 3/16” balsa.
The inside piece is notched to accept the nose gear mount.
Here, the 1/8” nose gear mount has been laid out and cut to shape. The hole for the gear wire has been drilled, as well as two hot air exits.
Laminate the cowl sides, and epoxy the nose gear mount into place. Make sure everything is trued up, and square.
Looking inside
Some scrap balsa added to the front of the cowl, a little shaping of the opening, and here we are.
Jigging up, and constructing the wing and booms
I have removed the shaped fuselage blocks. I used a wood gouge, and hollowed them out to about 1/8” thick. This removes a fair amount of unwanted weight.
I’m using a fitted sheet of sheetrock as a base to build on. It makes it easy to mark up the surface to provide accurate jigging.
Start first, by drawing a line straight across the center of the surface.
I used a sheetrockers square to draw this line. It’s a useful tool to have around.
The top line lines up wit the aft bulkhead. The second two linesrelate to the width
of the I-
Measure from the plans, and get the measurement from the aft bulkhead, to the hingeline of the elevator. Transfer this dimension to the building surface, and draw another line crossing at 90 degrees to the centerline.
Measure the distance from the centerline, to the centerline of the booms, and draw them onto the building surface.
As an alternative, you can attach the plan to your flat building surface, and use the plan itself as the building/alignment tool instead of drawing the lines.
We have a few parts to get ready before we go any further. I came up with a method that allows the use of removable torsion gear instead of the 1/8” flat plate plywood shown on the original plans. I used the pattern sheet to make these parts. A lite coating of 3M keeps the patterns in place.
I could have used 1/8” plywood, but I’ve been making an ultra light substitute for years. I laminate 1/64” ply to both sides of a piece of 3/32” balsa.
Her’re the finished gear supports shown with a length of gear block. The supports weigh a little less than ½ oz.
Now is the time to make the horns, joiners, and such. It’d also time to prep the booms for securing the horns in place.
The original plans showed a control system that was driven from the center of the flaps out to the booms. Another flap horn, at each boom, drove a pushrod to elevator horns, at each end of the elevator.
While robust, and limiting flex in the control system, it could lead to problems
if, and when there were any mis-
I made up a corrected throw flap horn to be driven by the 4” bellcrankto the center of the flaps. I made up a flap horn to be placed at the outboard boom to drive the elevator pushrod. I chose the outboard figuring that it might save me fro adding a lot of tip weight to balance the plane side to side.
In the picture below, you can see the flap elevator horn wire going through the inboard boom. There is no horn on the outboard joiner wire.
The photo above shows the plane being set up on the reference lines. The fuselage is carefully aligned, and spot glued with a few drops of CA. Remember, at this point, the plane is upside down, so the inboard wing is on your right side.
The distance to the wing tip plates are measured and drawn, using that sheetrock square, from the centerline of the fuse.
The spars, leading edge, and trailing edge are installed into the fuse. A bit of sanding, and fitting will be required. Do not glue them in yet.
Set the end of the spars into the tip plate, and carefully align the tip plate to the lines you just drew. Use a square to make sure they are upright, and squared up. Tack glue each tip plate in place.
Place the center flap horn into place before you install the trailing edge. It’s necessary to cut a relief in one side of the fuse to allow the horn clearance.
Set the leading and trailing edges in place at the tip plates. Once you are satisfied with the locations, and fits, you can glue the spar and leading edge into place. Don’t glue the trailing edge until you’ve installed the booms.
You should next begin installing the boom sides next. On the prototype, I made all the boom sides identical. This was a mistake, since the spar and the trailing edge are both swept back. I’ve redrawn each boom side to fit properly, so pay attention or you may have problems.
Slide the elevator horn, and the joiner wire into their respective booms. Next slide the boom sides onto the correct trailing edge. Once you are satisfied, the trailing edge can be glued into the fuse, and the tip plates. Don’t glue the boom sides to the trailing edge yet,
Do align the booms the fore and aft boom centerlines. Notice that there are tabs at the front, and rear of the booms. These set the booms up in the correct relationship to the rest of the plane.
Make up your bellcrank assembly. The original used a 3 inch bellcrank, but I believe it’s better to use a 4 inch one. As you can see, I set my bellcrank reversed, my preferred way.
The bellcrank is installed by drilling through the 1/8” plywood spar joiner, at the middle of the spar material. A wire is pushed through the hole, through the bellcrank and spacers, and out the bottom. A simple plywood cap secures the end of the rod.
If you’re happy with the alignment, you can now glue the booms to the trailing edge.
I used 1/8” sq. balsa to set the width for the booms
A 3/8” end piece is placed at the rear of the boom. What’s showing here is the problem
caused by having all the booms the same. A slight mis-
Laminate a stack of strip ribs one by one, next to each side of the booms. I used 3 of the 1/8” thick ribs to make the 3/8” ribs. I eventually used the strip rib jig to cut 3/16” ribs to make these stacks.
You can now install the outer gear support, right up tight to the rib stack. I measured out and installed the inner gear support, but I could have waited until I had set the third rib.
Make yourself a spacing jig about 10 inches long. Use it to set each rib spacing.
All the strip ribs are installed on the bottom of the outboard wing.
Repeat the same procedure for the inboard wing, but remember to route the leadouts.
Another view showing the gear supports relationship to the strip ribs
The bottom piece is now glued to the inboard boom,
Here’s the outboard boom before the bottom is glued into place.
Once this is glued up, cut the assembly loose from the building board, and turn it over.
Re tack and install the strip ribs to the top of the wing.
Here’s a view of the top of the bellcrank installation before the plywood joiner and cap is installed.
The wing is framed up, but the elevator pushrod is not installed
A view of the completed bellcrank assembly.
It’s a tight fit, but it does fit and work.
The booms are capped and shaped.
Gear blocks in place.
It’s pretty well framed up. The blocks are glued into place, and the nose ring is installed.
Since the wing is swept back, we’ll need to make up what are called “Lucky Box’s” to keep the controls free.
I use 1/8” x ¼” rectangular tubing. It allows about 3/64” movement both sides of center.
The slot is neatly broached by the following method.
I hold the shaped flap between two thicker pieces of balsa. I use a short piece of the tapered flap stock so that I can drill straight into it with a 1/8” drill.
I drill two holes side by side, and then use a sharpened length of the rectangular stock to cut, or broach the opening.
Here’s a side view of the prepared brass “Lucky Box”.
Here’s an end view that shows how the end was relieved for the horn wire.It becomes a rather simple matter to now insert the “lucky box” into the flaps. A light application of Ca carefully applied will secure them in place.
Torino
The original Torino used an elevator horn driven off each flap end. I didn’t want to add to the complexity, and also wanted to have an adjustable elevator. The answer, for me was to use a CF tube to torsionally stiffen the flap the elevator would be driven with.
Since I was driving the elevator from one end, I also used a CF tube at the elevator leading edge to torsionally stiffen the elevator.
The wing tips have been modified to allow the use of adjustable leadouts. Due to the sweep of the wings, this adjustablillity is essential for trimming. The leadouts have to be able to move all the way to the leading edge of the wing.
The top picture,(below) shows the opening from the inside of the tip. The lower picture shows the opening from the outside of the tip and shows that the front line will be able to move all the way to the leading edge.
I chose this type of adjustment solution. I could have opted for the modern “slider” style, but went with this more classic look.
No off the shelf canopy’s are available for this design, so I made my own from a soda bottle. Below, you can see the plug I made with the heat formed canopy still in place. A rather simple solution for small and normal sized custom canopy’s.
When trimmed, and fitted in place, It looks like it was made for it..........
I really like the look we can achieve with gear door covers. It helps to make the mounting system become less noticeable. I’ve included a picture from the same area after the plane was finished to illustrate.
I’m using the pattern, from the sheet, to stack and cut the parts for the gear doors. The method is outlined in the tutorial on pattern sheets.
All the parts for the gear doors are cut, or bent, and ready for assembly.
The following series of pictures illustrate the assembly, of the gear doors.
There we have it. The Torino is framed up, with the covering applied, and is now ready for serious paint and final finishing.